League of Legends: League of Unknowns

During the last LPL, Team Skycrown fielded a combination of Soraka, Malzahar, and Lee Sin. This allowed Team Praetor to overrun all opposition, and gave Team Revelation a savage kick to the nuts.

This year, Team Skycrown planned to reprise those same strategies. Although it dragged a little in the current patch, making it much harder to bust down the outer towers, once they got rolling, they remained unstoppable.

Most importantly, the team had developed new tower-breaking tactics: Hammer-and-Anvil, and Delaying Interception!

The Hammer-and-Anvil stratagem had been used before to bring down the first-tier Mid tower: Four champions laid siege to the tower, wearing it down as they abandoned the rest of the lanes. While the enemy team was distracted by this, Da Luo would sneak down from the Top lane and pop out behind said tower.

This put the tower’s defenders in a very awkward position: They had little hope of using the tower to score themselves a couple of kills in trade, because the Skycrown players would always prioritize destroying the tower over getting champion kills. And yet, falling back was a painful notion for the defenders, because losing that tower would mean falling behind by nearly a thousand gold.

As a result of a moment’s indecision, Team Revelation had lost both their defending champions along with the tower, and there was nothing they could do to prevent their second-tier Bottom-lane tower from following suit.

Team Skycrown’s Top, Jungler, and Bot-lane duo were quick to fall in whenever a team fight broke out, like a rigorously trained platoon of soldiers who responded to orders with neither question nor hesitation.

Team Revelation had stumbled, ever so slightly, and then the next thing they knew, four enemy champions had appeared in the Bottom lane, moving to advance.

When they finally moved to fend off the attack, Trundle forced them into another humiliating situation, pinning them down by ambushing them en route and splitting their formation right down the middle. Those champions who could reach the tower had been forced to withdraw anyway, lest they be insta-killed under the tower with Team Skycrown’s chain CC and burst damage.Read more chapter on vipnovel

They’d seen four-one split pushes before, and various supplementary attack tactics… but that was the first time Team Revelation had ever experienced being ambushed in the lane in order to support a split push!

“What inspired tactics!” Zhang Aijing stared up at the screen, eyes shining.

Four-one split-pushing had its drawbacks: If the enemy team managed to force a team fight, you’d be outnumbered five to four, and you’d be screwed unless your last guy was Shen, who could still teleport in to join the fight.

A supplementary attack meant, for example, if someone got ganked in their lane, everyone who couldn’t run over there in time would instead push their lanes hard, in order to assault the enemy tower. This, too, was not without its caveats: The enemy’s concentrated numbers would allow them to break two towers in a row, and all of a sudden your base would be in jeopardy. The scattered forces of your own team wouldn’t be able to quite match that.

Aijing had long been in search of a way to perfect either of these strategies. Who would have expected Team Skycrown to suddenly demonstrate these two methods of assaulting towers? She found herself in awe of Yu Luocheng’s genius.

When you had the advantage, begin by pushing in the minion waves along two lanes, and then immediately gather your team in one of those lanes.

Seeing an incoming mass of minions, the enemy would invariably respond by heading over to clear them off, for the sake of protecting their tower while also farming some gold. Meanwhile, Team Skycrown would mount a brutal charge down the other lane.

Revelation was a well-seasoned team of veterans, and responded to each crisis comparably better than a different team might have done. If they continued numbly sending out two champions to hold the tower, they would just lose it all again.

Of course, Aijing understood that actually executing such a strategy was only possible beneath the command of a canny leader. Everyone on the team had to demonstrate absolute unity, and the highest level of teamwork.

***

The jungle-based economy was completely under Team Skycrown’s monopoly now. They slew the Dragon at regular intervals, the gold difference widening ever further each time. Then they carried on with the Hammer-and-Anvil tactic, systematically toppling all the towers along the Top lane. Team Revelation had no holdings left standing beyond their walls.

The gold difference had now gone past ten thousand. To see such a disparity at twenty minutes into the game, the match was already as good as decided.

Now that the enemy had lost all their outer towers, it was the ideal moment to seize the Baron.

The Skycrown players changed their Trinkets to Sweeping Lenses, and cleared all enemy wards from the jungle. They had Vision Wards scattered throughout the wilderness, and knew every move the Revelation players made in there.

The Team Revelation players didn’t dare to step outside to farm any minions at all, because they had no idea where Team Skycrown might be lying in wait!

As they cowered behind their walls, they suddenly noticed that Kennen and Cassiopeia, currently farming in the lanes, were now wreathed in the violet aura of the Baron Buff!

“The other three were stealing the Baron…” Hao Yue was fed up with this.

Seeing Kennen and Cassiopeia running about out in the open, he’d assumed that the enemy team was presently cleaning out the jungle. Instead, they’d already been taking the Baron!

Truth be told, even if they’d known, it wasn’t as though they could have done anything about it. With a gold difference of ten thousand between them, heading out to challenge Team Skycrown would only result in giving them an Ace.

***

“No mercy at all, I see.” Asmodai sighed as he watched Team Skycrown advancing behind the might of the Baron Buff.

They’d taken control of the game since that team fight down in the Bottom lane. They pushed hard, and then teamed up right away. They moved with purpose, and they knew what they were doing.

Before the twenty-minute mark, the kills had been five to one. The only death they’d suffered was when Riven ganked them during the early game, taking down Yu Luocheng’s Kennen. After that, Team Revelation had no further opportunities whatsoever to get any more kills off of Team Skycrown.

There was no hope of catching any of them on their own. The only option was a team fight!

The problem lay in the gold difference between both teams. Starting a fight with Team Skycrown was something Team Revelation had to handle with the utmost caution. And so, one side continued to snowball¹ against the other, the advantage only growing with each passing moment.

From the moment they lost the Bottom lane, their first tower there, and then the Dragon right after that, it seemed Team Revelation’s defeat had already been decided.

***

To no one’s surprise, the Baron Buff transformed Team Skycrown into angels of death.

The Inhibitor Towers had become inconsequential to them. Even a Support Kennen had assembled such wonders as a ‘Talisman of Ascension’ as well as ‘Zhonya’s Hourglass’.¹

Luocheng activated the Talisman of Ascension’s movement speed buff, and charged headlong into the fray. Never mind how many champions he could lock down—when Kennen rushed past the tower and then went golden, all of Team Revelation’s champions turned and fled.

Following the same plan as always, Team Skycrown toppled the tower first before proceeding further. After the tower, the Inhibitor was the next to fall.

Hao Yue couldn’t endure another moment of this torment. Activating his own ulti, he rushed to meet the enemy.

Before he could even come within reach of Draven or Cassiopeia, the two of them unleashed their overwhelming damage upon him, eliminating him instantly.

Bai Feng’s Lucian remained at a safe distance, making his own feeble attacks. With the pathetic gear he was packing, he didn’t even give pause to Trundle, who by now was built like a brick house.

***

“It looks like Team Skycrown is a hard counter to Team Revelation,” Forgetful Laughter said to Aijing, beside him. “Their pace is too fast to follow, and Lucian has been completely left behind—neutralizing about half of Team Revelation’s combat power.”

“Yeah. Still, the sheer power of Team Skycrown… it kinda scares me,” Aijing said earnestly.

Thinking back to the year before, Team Skycrown had used an array of brilliant tactics to defeat Team Revelation. Each game was over within thirty minutes. As an additional consideration, Bai Feng’s equipment had been steadily improving with time, quietly presenting the possibility of a comeback. This suggested that in spite of an economic advantage, Team Skycrown didn’t take any chances.

This year’s match, however, showed no hint anywhere of Team Skycrown possibly having the game taken away from them. They were in full control here, and their teamwork was simply breath-taking. When to storm in, when to fall back, when to push the waves, when to sweep the jungles… it was as though every detail had already been laid out ahead of time.

In comparison, Team Revelation had demonstrated nothing in the way of coordinated strategy. From start to finish, their only accomplishment was killing off Kennen that one time at the beginning of the game.

Finishing the game in twenty-three minutes, despite the pace of the game being greatly slowed down this competitive season. It was hard to believe that you were watching a team which had stood among the best four in the country several years in a row, being defeated by a team that had been in the LPL for barely a year!

***

One might suggest that perhaps, during the first round, Team Skycrown had been in top form, and had managed to hold on to their advantage all throughout the game, so that was the main reason why Team Revelation looked bad.

As it happened, the second game was finished in twenty-five minutes. The spectating pro players were too shocked for words.

Twenty-three minutes for the first game, twenty-five minutes for the next one…

In the second game, Team Skycrown had employed a Lane-Swapping strategy: The Bot-lane duo had gone up to the Top lane to bully Team Revelation’s Rengar. At Level 3, Zhou Yan had brought Elise over and, together with Luocheng and Lin Dong, they’d killed Rengar right underneath his own tower, before reducing the tower itself to ruins.

Once that was done, the duo had returned to the Bottom lane, leaving a financially destitute Rengar to be torn to pieces by Da Luo’s Renekton.

That time around, Team Skycrown hadn’t pulled out any new tricks—just a simple lane swap and tower dive, and they’d neutered the enemy Top-laner, so that he became easy pickings for a player of Da Luo’s caliber, who’d easily won the lane.

Twenty-five minutes, and then it was over.

The whole time, it was as though Team Revelation had been caught in a dream, never knowing what to do with their own champions. Typically relying on long-term scaling builds, it was peculiar to see them losing their towers so quickly. When they tried to shore up their losses by delving into the jungle to hunt for wild creeps, that only made them easier to pick off.

It had been a discombobulating experience. Despite Bai Feng’s considerable individual abilities, an under-developed ADC nevertheless asserted scant little impact on the outcome of a game.

Typically, an ADC champion only achieved its full potential after the twenty-five-minute mark.

But the game had ended in twenty-five minutes.

For all of Bai Feng’s skill, none of it could be brought to bear.